But as Elison argues in her 2004 book, Liberating Losses: When Death Brings Relief (co-written with Chris McGonigle), there’s no reason for guilt. We need to accept the fact that it’s perfectly natural for some people to breathe easier when a relative dies. “It may make us uncomfortable, or even anger us,” Elison very sensibly asserts, “but we must realize that it’s never our place to force someone to grieve in a way that we find acceptable. When someone dies, the bereaved family members must be forgiven if they are pleased to be getting their lives back, even if they can’t say it out loud.”
That the phenomenon Elison explores has always existed is made clear in one of the best pieces of “short-short” fiction ever written in this country, “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin, author of the classic novel The Awakening. It’s a work that remains as relevant—and challenging—today as it was when it was first published in 1894. Here it is in its entirety:
Knowing that Mrs. Mallard was afflicted with a heart trouble, great care was taken to break to her as gently as possible the news of her husband’s death.
It was her sister Josephine who told her, in broken sentences; veiled hints that revealed in half concealing. Her husband’s friend Richards was there, too, near her. It was he who had been in the newspaper office when intelligence of the railroad disaster was received, with Brently Mallard’s name leading the list of “killed.” He had only taken the time to assure himself of its truth by a second telegram, and had hastened to forestall any less careful, less tender friend in bearing the sad message.
She did not hear the story as many women have heard the same, with a paralyzed inability to accept its significance. She wept at once, with sudden, wild abandonment, in her sister’s arms. When the storm of grief had spent itself she went away to her room alone. She would have no one follow her.
There stood, facing the open window, a comfortable, roomy armchair. Into this she sank, pressed down by a physical exhaustion that haunted her body and seemed to reach into her soul.
She could see in the open square before her house the tops of trees that were all aquiver with the new spring life. The delicious breath of rain was in the air. In the street below a peddler was crying his wares. The notes of a distant song which some one was singing reached her faintly, and countless sparrows were twittering in the eaves.
There were patches of blue sky showing here and there through the clouds that had met and piled one above the other in the west facing her window.
She sat with her head thrown back upon the cushion of the chair, quite motionless, except when a sob came up into her throat and shook her, as a child who has cried itself to sleep continues to sob in its dreams.
She was young, with a fair, calm face, whose lines bespoke repression and even a certain strength. But now there was a dull stare in her eyes, whose gaze was fixed away off yonder on one of those patches of blue sky. It was not a glance of reflection, but rather indicated a suspension of intelligent thought.
There was something coming to her and she was waiting for it, fearfully. What was it? She did not know; it was too subtle and elusive to name. But she felt it, creeping out of the sky, reaching toward her through the sounds, the scents, the color that filled the air.
Now her bosom rose and fell tumultuously She was beginning to recognize this thing that was approaching to possess her, and she was striving to beat it back with her will—as powerless as her two white slender hands would have been.
When she abandoned herself a little whispered word escaped her slightly parted lips. She said it over and over under her breath: “free, free, free!” The vacant stare and the look of terror that had followed it went from her eyes. They stayed keen and bright. Her pulses beat fast, and the coursing blood warmed and relaxed every inch of her body.
She did not stop to ask if it were or were not a monstrous joy that held her. A clear and exalted perception enabled her to dismiss the suggestion as trivial.
She knew that she would weep again when she saw the kind, tender hands folded in death; the face that had never looked save with love upon her, fixed and gray and dead. But she saw beyond that bitter moment a long procession of years to come that would belong to her absolutely. And she opened and spread her arms out to them in welcome.
There would be no one to live for during those coming years; she would live for herself. There would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature.
A kind intention or a cruel intention made the act seem no less a crime as she looked upon it in that brief moment of illumination.
And yet she had loved him—sometimes. Often she had not. What did it matter! What could love, the unsolved mystery, count for in face of this possession of self-assertion which she suddenly recognized as the strongest impulse of her being!
“Free! Body and soul free!” she kept whispering.
Josephine was kneeling before the closed door with her lips to the keyhole, imploring for admission. “Louise, open the door! I beg, open the door—you will make yourself ill. What are you doing Louise? For heaven’s sake open the door.”
“Go away. I am not making myself ill.” No; she was drinking in a very elixir of life through that open window.
Her fancy was running riot along those days ahead of her. Spring days, and summer days, and all sorts of days that would be her own. She breathed a quick prayer that life might be long. It was only yesterday she had thought with a shudder that life might be long.
She arose at length and opened the door to her sister’s importunities. There was a feverish triumph in her eyes, and she carried herself unwittingly like a goddess of Victory. She clasped her sister’s waist, and together they descended the stairs. Richards stood waiting for them at the bottom.
Some one was opening the front door with a latchkey. It was Brently Mallard who entered, a little travel-stained, composedly carrying his grip-sack and umbrella. He had been far from the scene of accident, and did not even know there had been one. He stood amazed at Josephine’s piercing cry; at Richards’ quick motion to screen him from the view of his wife.
But Richards was too late.
When the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease—of joy that kills.
So death, the most terrifying of ills, is nothing to us, since so long as we exist, death is not with us, but when death comes, then we do not exist.
—EPICURUS
Grief Goodies
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Now you can “shop” at the Grief Store and be assured that the books, tapes, cards, and memorial products you find are the “best of the best” in the death care industry!
Among the many hard-to-find items available at the Grief Store are videos with titles such as Footprints on Our Hearts, Tear Soup, and What Color Is Dead?; memorial items such as tear-shaped silver pendants and “Merry Christmas from Heaven” tree ornaments; and a wide selection of bereavement books, including Darcie’s own delightful Why Are the Casseroles Always Tuna? A Loving Look at the Lighter Side of Grief. For more information go to www.griefstore.com or call 888-564-6018.
ISN’T IT IRONIC?
(PART III)
In the year 1060, Béla of Hungary, after a drawn-out power struggle with his brother, Andràs, finally claimed his country’s throne. Two years later, while seated on that selfsame throne, he was killed when its canopy collapsed, crushing him to death.
Where Do the
Gone Things Go?
Children and Death
Considering all the media violence they’re bombarded with on a daily basis, it may seem strange to assert that today’
s children have very little exposure to death. But compared to the way things used to be—when kids watched their loved ones die at home, saw the corpses laid out in the parlor, witnessed (and even participated in) the butchering of farm animals—American life, rife though it may be with make-believe mayhem, actively shields children from the harsh realities of death. Seeing a horde of computerized zombies blown away onscreen hardly promotes a realistic understanding of mortality—particularly when the creatures are likely to rise again a few seconds later.
ASK DR. DEATH
Dear Dr. Death:
I understand that during the seven-day Jewish mourning period known as shiva, all mirrors in the home of the bereaved must be covered. Can you explain the meaning of this custom?
Curious About Jewish Death Rituals
Dear Curious:
The usual explanation is that at a time when all thoughts should be on the departed, there is no place for personal vanity. Most anthropologists, however, regard this as a modern rationalization for a practice rooted in primitive superstition.
It is a well-documented fact that fear of the dead is a primal human emotion. This fear, according to experts, springs from the archaic belief that at the moment of death, even the most dearly beloved relative instantly turns into a vengeful demon that seeks to wreak harm on the living. As a result of this belief, humans have always taken extraordinary measures to protect themselves from the malign spirits of the newly departed. Some aboriginal tribes, for example—convinced that souls cannot cross a sheet of water—bury their dead on islands or on the far side of a river. Others make sure to throw open all the doors and windows at the moment of death so that the spirit will make a prompt exit. Still others place heavy slabs of wood on dead bodies before interring them to keep the spirits weighted down.
The Jewish custom of covering up mirrors during the period of mourning stems (so anthropologists believe) from a similar impulse. It is a common superstitious belief throughout the world that mirrors have the power to steal or house human souls. (It is because he has no soul, for example, that Dracula has no reflection when he looks in a mirror. Similarly, breaking a mirror is dangerous because you might damage your soul.) For this reason, covering up all the mirrors when a loved one dies is a way to prevent his or her now-malevolent spirit from taking up permanent residence in the household.
This custom, incidentally, is not the only one still practiced in the modern world that derives from the primitive fear of the dead. Indeed, as Katherine Ashenburg explains in her fascinating book, The Mourner’s Dance: What We Do When People Die (North Point Press, 2002), “Most of our traditions and rituals are born out of fear and self protectiveness. The dark clothes we wear to funerals hide the living from the malevolent spirit. Crying and speaking well of the dead persuade him that he is regretted. Holding a wake reassures him that he is not forgotten, perhaps even deludes him into thinking he is still living. The tombstone is an attempt to keep the spirit underground, where he can do less harm. So, symbolically, are the small stones Jews leave on tombstones when they visit a cemetery.”
With death so shrouded in taboo in our youth-obsessed, longevity-crazed society it falls to parents to shed light on the subject. Unfortunately, because of their own deep-seated discomfort, most grown-ups have a harder time talking about the facts of death than about the facts of life. The parent who would never dream of telling his or her kids that they were brought by the stork or found under a cabbage leaf resorts to all kinds of euphemisms and evasions when discussing death. But—as with misinformation about sexual matters—such tactics do more harm than good, exacerbating the child’s anxieties and potentially affecting him for life.
Mourning teddy from Plush Sentiments/Comfort Gifts. Courtesy of Beth Sanderson.
When broaching this delicate topic, it helps to know something about the way a child’s ideas about death typically evolve. The pioneering study of this subject was conducted in 1948 by Hungarian psychologist Maria Nagy. According to her findings, children pass through three developmental stages in their conception of death. Between the ages of three and five, they tend to see death as a kind of diminished form of life, a state akin to sleep from which the person will eventually awaken. During stage two, which occurs between the ages of five and nine, they understand that death is permanent but tend to believe it happens mostly to others, particularly the elderly. They generally personify death as some sort of monster—a ghost, skeleton, bogeyman, and so on—and believe that it can be evaded through luck and skill. It is not until they reach the third stage, around age nine, that they begin to understand that death is universal.
Of course, not every child conforms to this model. There are ten-year-olds who still believe that only old people die, while some preschoolers have a precocious understanding of the finality of death. As every parent knows, children mature both physically and emotionally at dramatically different rates. Still, Nagy’s findings have largely been confirmed by subsequent studies.
Based on her work, psychologists now offer a standard set of guidelines when advising parents on the best way to talk about death with their young ones. While experts agree that the subject should be dealt with in an honest and straightforward way, they stress that the information must be suitable for the child’s age. Clearly, telling your little one about the process of bodily decay that Grandpa’s corpse will undergo in the coffin is just as inappropriate as describing the mechanics of sexual intercourse to a preschooler who asks where babies come from.
For parents looking for help, one of the best and most widely admired resources is Earl Grollman’s Talking About Death: A Dialogue Between Parent and Child (Beacon Press, 1976). This slender volume begins with a twenty-five-page read-along picture book, beautifully tailored to the emotional needs and mental capacities of young children. This is followed by a straightforward and eminently sensible guide addressed to parents.
Grollman recommends that children be told right away about a death in the family since delay only increases the risk that the news will be conveyed “by the wrong person in the wrong way.” Though the impulse to soften the blow is understandable, parents should avoid euphemisms like “We lost Grandpa today,” “Grandpa was such a good person that God wanted him,” or “Grandpa went away on a long trip and will be gone for a very long time.” Such explanations are bound to produce confusion and anxiety on the part of the child, who may blame his parents for not going out to look for Grandpa, or feel heartbroken that Grandpa left without saying goodbye, or decide that it makes more sense to behave badly if being good means getting snatched away by God. By the same token, saying that Grandpa is no longer around because he went to sleep or got sick and was taken to the hospital can produce a pathological dread of bedtime in a child or cause him to develop a terror of ever falling ill.
In a gentle and loving but unambiguous way, the parent should let the child know that death is real and irrevocable—that, as Grollman writes, “Dead is dead. Grandfather is gone. He will never come back.” Comparisons to nature can be helpful: “You put seeds in the ground. They bud. Beautiful flowers appear. After a time, the flowers fade. They fall off. They die.”
Children should be permitted, even encouraged, to express their sorrow openly. Particularly in a culture like ours, which has traditionally frowned on excessive displays of emotion in males, little boys must be told that it’s okay to cry. Small children are also apt to feel guilty when a loved one dies—to experience the loss as a punishment for their own misbehavior. Parents must therefore reassure them that they are in no way to blame. (“Grandfather did not die because you may have been bad. You did nothing to make him die.”)
One of the trickiest issues for parents to deal with is the inevitable question “Where is he now?” Here, too, it’s important to avoid fanciful explanations. In a famous poem, “First Death in Nova Scotia,” Elizabeth Bishop poignantly evokes her own childhood confusion when her well-meaning but misguided parents told her that her little cousin Arthur, who had re
cently died, was going off to live with the royal family. Though intended to make the child feel better, this explanation only left her more deeply troubled. “But how could Arthur go,” she wonders, “clutching his tiny lily, / with his eyes shut up so tight / and the roads deep in snow?”
Grollman (himself a rabbi) acknowledges that some parents might wish to offer a religious view involving the hereafter. But he also strongly recommends that children be supplied with a factual answer about the final disposal of the body: for example, “When life stopped and grandfather died, his body was placed in a casket and placed in the earth in a cemetery. A stone or plaque will identify the place of burial. The cemetery will be kept beautiful with flowers and shrubs.” (Or, alternatively, “His body was burned in a place called a crematory. The ashes were placed in a small box which was placed in the wall of a building called a columbarium.”)
Finally, parents should stress that although the loved one is gone forever, he will continue to live on in the child’s memories of him. (“Of course we shall have grandfather in other ways. We can never forget that he died. But we will always remember that he lived.”)
RECOMMENDED READING
Grollman’s book is the best available choice for parents looking for a sensitive, highly accessible text they can share with their children. But there are plenty of other works on the subject. Hannelore Wass and Charles A. Corr’s Helping Children Cope with Death: Guidelines and Resources (Hemisphere, 1982) contains two extensive, annotated bibliographies. The first consists of forty-four books for adults that are “related to helping children cope with death.” The second lists 160 children’s books in which death is treated in a sensitive and meaningful way, ranging from classics such as Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s The Yearling and E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web to more recent works such as Joan Fassler’s My Grandpa Died Today and Phyllis Rash Hughes’s Dying Is Different.
The Whole Death Catalog Page 34
